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Why housing affordability in Halifax is stuck in 1996

Jodi Brown isn’t afraid of a little humiliation if it brings attention to the state of housing in Halifax.

When she first moved into Greystone — a public housing development built by the former city of Halifax in the 1970s — last year, Brown was put in a unit filled with mice and reeking of cat urine.

Elaine Williams — seen here in the garden in the Mulgrave Park housing community in Halifax — has been documenting the neighbourhood’s deterioration for 40 years. (Zane Woodford / StarMetro)

Mulgrave Park, a hilly Halifax neighbourhood that is home to historic public housing projects, is finally getting some long-awaited maintenance, including construction on its crumbling retaining walls. But advocates say not nearly enough is being spent to maintain the city’s public housing – and build more to fill a growing need. (Zane Woodford / StarMetro)

Jodi Brown, a resident of the Greystone public housing unit in Halifax, kicked up a fuss online after she was placed in an apartment that reeked of cat urine and was infested with mice. She was later assigned a different space, and her old one remains empty. She has since been advocating for improved housing inspections. (Zane Woodford / StarMetro)

In short: “The home was gross,” she said.

Unlike many other tenants, Brown did not suffer in silence. Instead she “embarrassed the hell out of herself on Twitter,” posting photos of her unit until eventually she got a new one. Today her old unit remains vacant.

“They realized at that point that they couldn’t shut me up,” she said.

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Since then, Brown’s been working to get inspections completed in her neighbourhood. She posts photos and videos on Twitter and on a Facebook page she set up, Nova Scotia Housing Tenants.

“I want to expose the government on housing,” Brown said in an interview.

But it’s not always easy. Brown said she has to fight to show people the conditions in public housing because so many others have given up.

“I wanted to show all the mould and the mice and rats, but people get embarrassed and they won’t let you in. And they won’t talk about it,” she said.

Brown is more vocal than most about the scope of the problem, but many are losing patience as their homes deteriorate and governments fail to implement solutions in good time.

Housing Nova Scotia said in April it had started a “very detailed inspection program,” hoping to put a price tag on the maintenance work that needs to be done.

Statistics Canada measures the affordability of housing across Canada with a statistic called “core housing need.” A household is in core housing need if the home doesn’t have enough rooms, is in need of major repairs or if more than 30 per cent of the household’s pre-tax income is spent on housing.

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More than 22,000 households in Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM), or 13.7 per cent, are in core housing need, according to the most recent census numbers from 2016. That places Halifax at 11th on Statistics Canada’s list of cities with the highest percentage of core housing need — higher than the national average of 12.7 per cent and higher than most cities of similar population.

With so many people in need and little affordable housing being built, people are put in public or publicly subsidized housing that is often poorly maintained and sometimes even filthy, like the unit Brown encountered.

To address the problem, Halifax teamed up with the province and other organizations in 2015 for the Housing and Homelessness Partnership. The partnership set a lofty goal: creating or preserving 5,000 affordable homes within five years. Council approved that goal at the end of 2016.

Today, that target is a long way from being met.

According to Department of Community Services (DCS) Minister Kelly Regan, in the last three years — looking beyond the start of the plan — 450 new affordable housing units have been added in HRM. Most of those spaces aren’t new builds, but rather the result of rent supplements; units in privately owned buildings that have been subsidized by the government.

With three years left to add another 4,550, it seems likely the Housing and Homelessness Partnership will not reach its goal.

In response to this failure, HRM Deputy Mayor Waye Mason made a motion early this year calling for city staff to prepare a report on the possibility bringing housing back into Halifax’s municipal control.

“We are stalled and sinking,” Mason said at a committee meeting in January. “I am not blaming anyone, but the emperor has no clothes.”

Before 1996, the year the regional municipality amalgamated, the former City of Halifax handled housing and income assistance.

Municipalities across Nova Scotia gave up their responsibility for housing and social security that year in what’s known as the Service Exchange, the result of a 1992 report by the Task Force on Local Government.

The Task Force recommended the province take over some services, including housing and income assistance, and leave others, such as road maintenance, to municipalities. Proponents of the idea argued that services such as housing have benefits beyond any individual community, and that the province should ensure the quality of those essential services don't differ across Nova Scotia.

Mason wants to take one of those services back. He envisions an arms-length body, funded by the municipality, that would maintain the existing public housing, work with the non-profit housing sector and, perhaps most importantly, build new affordable housing at a rate of up to 1,000 units per year.

The motion for a staff report passed, but it’s one of the most complex council has ever asked for. It will take years to get back to council, Mason said.

In the meantime, there is much the municipality, the province and others can do to ensure no one has to live without a basic necessity of life. After all, Mason’s pitch for the municipality to take control is not really a solution in itself; the real solutions have been ignored or neglected for decades.

Elaine Williams has watched it happen. She walks the grounds of Mulgrave Park twice a year, documenting the deterioration of her Halifax neighbourhood of more than 40 years.

“These are things that have been going on in our community for years that need to be fixed,” Williams said. “I just go around and take pictures of the community, and when I meet with people, I say, ‘This is what we live in.’”

Williams takes photos of her community’s overgrown bushes, broken lights and the crumbling retaining walls that hold the hillside neighbourhood together. She brings the evidence to meetings with the Metropolitan Regional Housing Authority, the division of Housing Nova Scotia that looks after Halifax.

“It kind of keeps a record of what they’re doing and what they’re not doing,” she said.

Over the last few months, Mulgrave Park has been getting what Williams calls a nice “facelift,” including fresh sod and much-needed repairs to the community’s heating systems and retaining walls. These upgrades were a long, long time coming, she said, and there’s still much left to do.

“Without that wall, that hill will fall down. Our walls are holding up all that, and that’s why we fought so hard to make sure we get new walls,” Williams said.

The money comes from the federal government through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The community is grateful for change following decades of little investment.

But Williams doesn’t fault the people at Metropolitan Regional Housing Authority or Housing Nova Scotia for the inaction over the years.

“Everyone can’t put the blame on housing. Housing can only do what the government gives them,” she said.

That’s a statement Jim Graham would agree with.

“It’s not housing’s fault,” Graham said. “There’s no sense yelling at housing, they’re not in control.”

Graham is the executive director of the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia (AHANS). The association works with the three orders of government to research housing issues and implement the Housing and Homelessness Partnership and sometimes consults non-profits in the municipality.

To understand how Halifax has reached this point, Graham points to the evolution of housing in the province over the past few decades.

Housing Nova Scotia is delivered through the Department of Community Services. The department’s minister, currently Regan, is in charge, though Housing Nova Scotia has a CEO.

“It hasn’t always been that way,” Graham said. “If you go way back, way, way back, housing was always a provincial responsibility but looked after by something called the Housing Commission.”

In 1983, the commission was replaced by the Housing Department, which was later merged with DCS.

The switch came from a change in the wording of Nova Scotia’s Housing Act. Once the arms-length commission had the power to borrow and lend money and to build housing; now the minister does.

Graham worked for Housing Nova Scotia for 30 years and saw the changes first-hand.

“The housing structure in the province kind of lost its way, in the sense of its overall responsibilities, and became much more of a program administrator,” he said.

During that time period, the federal government became less involved in holding up its end of the housing bargain: providing funding through CMHC.

As researcher Nick Falvo wrote in a 2007 research paper titled Addressing Canada’s Lack of Affordable Housing, “The 1990s may well have represented the peak of neoliberalism in Canada, and pressure had mounted on senior levels of government to cut spending, not increase it.” Across the country, that belt-tightening meant less money for affordable housing from the federal and provincial governments.

According to a 2014 report prepared for the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, when adjusted for inflation, per-capita federal government spending on affordable housing “dropped by over one third” between 1993 and 2013.

There’s a new federal housing strategy currently in the works that guarantees more money — $40 billion over 10 years across the country — but it’s unclear what it will mean for Halifax specifically. And the provincial government will have to match any funding coming in.

The authority of the provincial government and the long-term dip in federal funding has brought Nova Scotia to a housing situation that many, including Graham and Mason, say isn’t working.

“The province has done some things that have put the public housing and social housing stock in jeopardy,” Graham said. “And I say the province rather than Housing because I don’t think Housing’s done it.”

One problem, Graham said, is that the province stores money from the federal government in something called the Deferred Federal Contribution Fund (DFCF). That money must be spent on housing — but doesn’t have to be spent right away. Every unspent housing transfer from the federal government ends up there, and the balance fluctuates year-to-year as the transfers come in.

The DFCF had a balance of $38.2 million at the end of March, according to Housing Nova Scotia.

The province has been spending that money. The balance in 2014 was about $62 million, and the DCS minister at the time, Joanne Bernard, told her colleagues the the Liberal government was the first to start dipping in.

“It has always been characterized as a rainy-day account by previous governments,” Bernard is quoted in a transcript of an April 2014 committee meeting. “I've been saying for years, as have many, it has been pouring for years in Nova Scotia when it comes to social housing.”

There’s more spending ahead this year, according to DCS spokesperson Bruce Nunn, who said $11 million from the the fund is budgeted for public housing repairs, support for non-profits and rent supplements.

Asked why the government isn’t just spending all the money, Regan would only say that the government is using it to make improvements to the housing stock.

“We are in fact using far more than any previous government ever has,” Regan said.

According to advocates, another problem — for public and non-profit housing — is that income-assistance rates have been too low for decades.

Income-assistance programs, often called welfare, help people in financial need cover expenses like housing, food and clothing. In Nova Scotia, income-assistance recipients receive a shelter allowance and a personal allowance monthly.

A single person on income-assistance gets a minimum of $300 for shelter, and that number rises to $535 under “certain circumstances,” typically for people with disabilities that prevent them from working. A family of two gets a minimum of $570, and a family of three gets a minimum of $620.

Those rates have remained flat for the past 30 years, without even considering inflation. The minimum amount for shelter for a single employable person in 1996 was $350, according to a report from Community Advocates Network with the Nova Scotia Association of Social Workers. The province dropped it to $225 later that year, and it’s barely climbed to the current $300.

Carol Charlebois, executive director of Welcome Housing, formerly known as the Metro Non-Profit Housing Association, has been working in the sector for more than 25 years. She remembers a tenant asking her to help create a budget with his income-assistance cheque back in 1990.

“It was difficult,” Charlebois said, “but people have almost the same amount of money now. It’s hardly changed since 1990.”

Welcome Housing owns almost 80 units of affordable housing in HRM for single people with very low incomes. In many of those units, Charlebois said, they keep the rent low enough to match income-assistance rates, and that’s not enough to allow the organization to pay for maintenance.

If the government raised those rates closer to market rents for bachelor apartments, which average more than $700, Welcome Housing would be in much better shape.

“That would make a big difference,” Charlebois said.

Regan said the government is in the process of “transitioning” income-assistance rates, including increasing everyone to the maximum levels and then raising those levels. But it’s unclear what those levels will rise to.

“So what you will see is a change to the way that it is delivered in the future, and those changes have begun to be rolled out. You’re going to see more over the next year and a half,” she said.

Asked what effect the low income-assistance rates have had on the amount of maintenance Housing Nova Scotia has been able to complete, Regan disagreed that they’ve had any effect.

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